It's been - and still is - quite the journey thus far in putting this proposal together. Striving to find contacts, collect information, think up solutions and communicate our ideas in the best way possible - all within a quickly diminishing time-limit - has been a very interesting team experience.
Many challenges were surely met, but most of them (in my point of view) have been overcome.
The first one was our scheduling. Finding a common time-slot is merely a routine administrative task, but as all three of us hailed from various faculties and had quite a few commitments outside of NUS, it proved to be a daunting challenge. Technology really helped - email and especially Google drive - but eventually, sacrifices had to be made, and we found ourselves holding our meetings on Sunday afternoons.
The second challenge was really to maintain a 'innocent-until-proven-guilty' view of each other, especially when deadlines were drawing near. Each of us went through a spell of illness, during which we were unable to contribute - and rightfully so! However, the team still did have to overcome some measure of blaming (even though it was never verbalised) with respect to late or unfinished work. Overall, I felt that keeping channels of communication constantly open was vital in order to enable the postponing of judgement, through clarification over certain actions (or lack of).
The last challenge, I felt, was the general nature of the team to be overwhelmingly task-oriented. Thus far, we have been churning our parts out and sticking to our 'to-do' lists - but I had hoped that there could have been a greater show of appreciation for one another, even though we were all working hard. However, I do believe that an experience of such a 'celebrative' culture within the team would require me to take initiative, and get the ball rolling.
I do look forward to the end of my group's presentation and an end to our labours. At the same time, I do appreciate the lessons that I have received on sacrifice, postponing judgement, and initiative. Here's to my team - cheers!
I do look forward to the end of my group's presentation and an end to our labours. At the same time, I do appreciate the lessons that I have received on sacrifice, postponing judgement, and initiative. Here's to my team - cheers!
Were there any specific strategies or measures you or your team members took to avoid the 'blame calling' you mentioned?
ReplyDeleteI felt that the team did not really want to communicate about this, because of the work we had to get done (and since sickness IS a legitimate excuse from work for awhile) - and probably because this teamwork would just be a short term engagement. The (subconscious) strategies we took was probably to sweep our gripes under the carpet and to grit our teeth as we shouldered each others' portions at different points.
DeleteI guess these aren't very healthy strategies - especially if it were a long-term engagement. The team would probably fall apart if there weren't any environments created for the team-members to express their individual gripes and opinions respectfully.
Our team faces the similar problems as well. Like myself, I am a freshman and am very overloaded with many core modules this semester. But, I did tell my team that I am stressed, and I can't contribute as frequent as they do. And they do understand my situation and do tolerate me. Hence, it think it is really important to speak out our difficulties.
ReplyDeleteAfter looking through your post, I realised that it is often the case that things are not spoken out blatantly at the beginning thus a lot of misunderstanding arises. However, after sometimes when we are really caught up with things that we could not contribute to the team, we slowly tried to talk things out. Towards the end when we aren't that busy anymore, we start to be more dedicated to the team. This is really about polishing teamwork, if we are able to talk things out earlier then this process will be of much less difficulty.
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